


Bog Standard

by applecore



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Aphrodisiacs, Belly Kink, Dubious Consent, Hockey Gods, Inflation, M/M, Multi, Other, Oviposition, Rookies, Tentacle Monsters, Tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-26 04:25:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4990129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/applecore/pseuds/applecore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The NHL draft entry class of 2006 are the new best and brightest, and they have to do what the best and brightest have always done: go to an isolated swamp in the Canadian wilderness, let the hockey gods have their way with them, and incubate the next generation of gods in their bellies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bog Standard

**Author's Note:**

  * For [heeroluva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heeroluva/gifts).



> Heeroluva, I've been eyeing your kinkiest of kinky prompts and wanting to write a treat for three or four exchanges now, and finally I managed it. I literally put every nominated character in a spreadsheet with their draft year and figured out which group looked like the most fun. I hope you like it. <3
> 
> Huge thanks to my betas, who made this so much better than it was.

The _facilities_ the NHL promised are a cluster of tents on an enormous platform floating in the middle of a bog. It stinks like a bog: mud and rotting things and algae. “World class accommodations,” Brad tells the lanky ginger who climbs up off the boat next to him. Brad recognizes him from the Q, but he can’t remember his name. The guy mumbles something in French. He doesn’t look at Brad.

Brad takes a breath to steady himself and almost chokes on it. 

The guy with the clipboard waves them on. The kid in front comes even with Brad. Backstrom, from Sweden. He ducks his head close to Brad’s ear, and he says in soft, accented English, “When will it start? Do you know?”

“I bet you’ll figure it out.” Brad slaps Backstrom’s stomach with a grin, and Backstrom flinches. 

There are maybe twenty of them milling around in the sunshine, six inches above the bog. Brad doesn’t know why he’s in this group – Backstrom is mister number four pick, and Brad thinks the ginger kid went fairly early, too. None of the other Bruins picks are here.

Another clipboard guy herds them into a tent, where they sit down to cafeteria food. Nobody complains. It was a long boat trip out, and some of them had been flying a long time before that.

As soon as their plates are empty, they’re herded to the next tent. It’s open to the evening, with netting instead of walls, and it’s lined with cots. “Sleep,” says another guy with a clipboard, and that sounds like a great idea, although the sun hasn’t even set. Brad strips to his boxers, and he falls asleep with his hand over his belly, wondering drowsily if there was something in the food.

*

He wakes up to someone shouting. When he peels his eyes open, he finds it’s Backstrom, clinging to one of the tent poles. “They’re gone!”

“Who?” somebody called.

Backstrom took a moment to answer. His voice wavers. “All of them.”

Brad’s head is heavy. Definitely something in the food. He drags it up off the pillow anyway. Other guys are doing the same. Someone stumbles out the door with Backstrom. A couple more follow. Ginger guy comes back in. “It’s true. It’s just us.”

The netting is gone, too. Staal reports there’s sandwiches laid out in the cook tent. Brad straggles over with the others and sits at a picnic table next to Backstrom, down the way from Bernier. For maybe the first time since he hit puberty, Brad’s not really hungry, but he eats anyway. Habit. 

“Will it hurt?” somebody asks. He has a lot of hair and an accent Brad can’t place.

There are snickers. “What, you afraid of pain?” asks another guy – Brassard? He sounds afraid.

“I hear we’ll like it,” someone else says. Snickers come in response to that, too, but weaker.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Backstrom says so softly Brad isn’t sure anyone hears but him.

He must have meant it for Brad, though. If he was just talking to himself, it’d be in Swedish. “It’s better than _not_ wanting it, right?” Brad says.

Backstrom’s eyes are wide and doubtful. 

Someday Brad is going to grind this guy into the boards, steal his pucks, and irritate the shit out of him, because irritation is Brad’s primary athletic skill. But today is not that day. Brad pats Backstrom’s baby face. “It’s for hockey.” 

Backstrom does not look reassured.

They finish eating. The guy who’s probably Brassard says, “What about the dishes?” They’re paper, so everyone dumps them into the garbage can by the door, and then some do-gooder goes and hunts up another bag from behind the condiments table. Oh, the do-gooder is Ginger. He hands off the bag, and he looks pale under his freckles.

“What’s up?” Brad says, low.

Ginger glances around, so Brad does, too. He doesn’t see anyone likely to listen in. Ginger whispers, “Don’t tell, okay? But that was all the food. There isn’t any more.”

Brad blinks at him. “It’s probably somewhere else.”

Ginger shakes his head. “There isn’t anywhere else. Just empty tents. This is it.”

Well. Shit. 

*

Except for the cook tent, they’re all open to the swamp. Someone finds the netting, but nobody tries to attach it. “Nothing’s biting,” somebody points out – Staal. Brad realizes it’s true. He, mosquito buffet his entire life, doesn’t have a single bite. 

Anyway, nobody wants to move much, either. 

Brad sits on the edge of the platform next to Ginger. It’s hot, and it only takes Brad a minute to dangle first one foot in the water, then the other. The water’s warm, too; it doesn’t help much. At least by this point Brad’s nose is pretty much numb to the bog stench.

“So who are you?” Brad asks.

Ginger slants him a look. “Claude Giroux,” he says, like Brad should have known.

Brad arches an eyebrow at Mr. Claude Giroux and waits. Giroux opens his mouth, holds it there a while, and says, “How tall _are_ you?”

“Tall enough to ride this ride,” Brad says and punches Giroux in the arm. Poor guy. Probably doesn’t have the space in his head to remember anyone picked below him. “It’s Marchand.”

Giroux looks like he’s trying to decide if he should stick his hand out to shake. Brad saves him the decision. “So, you into getting fucked up the ass by a tentacle god?”

Giroux gapes for a while, like he didn’t think anyone would have the balls to actually say it. “I have to be, right?”

“It’ll be good,” Brad says. If he says it, it’ll be true. “It’s probably all slippery, you know? It’ll poke right into you, kind of squirm inside until it’s real big—” Yeah, okay, this sounded iffy earlier but now it sounds a little awesome. “—and then pop, pop, pop!” He pops his P’s to demonstrate, and then he pats his stomach. Giroux follows the motion of his hand, fixed on it. “It’ll be good,” Brad repeats. He’s chubbing a little just thinking how good it’ll be. He runs his finger down it, over his boxers, and that’s pretty great, too.

He definitely was not this horny before breakfast.

“Yeah,” Giroux says with a catch in his throat. It makes Brad look up from the beginnings of his boner to see Giroux stroke himself. Brad catches his eye, nods down towards himself, and grins. After a blink, Giroux grins back.

“What do you think it’ll be like?” Brad says. He and his boner need more to go on, here.

“Big,” Giroux says. 

“Yeah.”

“And when they lay ‘em – do you think we’ll feel it?”

“Oh, yeah,” Brad says. It’ll be a fucking shame if they don’t. What’s even the point of getting the future laid in you one egg at a time if you can’t fucking feel it? “Big. And when you rub over your belly—”

“—you can feel ‘em,” Giroux finishes. “Yeah.” What he’s rubbing is way south of his belly. “All, round and—”

“—hard? Or maybe kind of squishy. Like tadpoles.”

“Maybe,” Giroux says.

They think on that for a moment, and Brad’s getting close, his breath getting a little short. He thinks of the weirdest, slimiest, most tentacled thing he can imagine, looming over him and in him, and he comes right there in his boxers with his feet hanging down in the water. Giroux follows him a moment later with a huff. He’s a huffy guy. 

Brad braces himself back on his hands, lifting his face to the sky, although there’s no sun anymore. His right hand is a little tacky on the wood. Nearby he can hear somebody else grunting – with help, it sounds like. That seems like a good idea, too. He should have thought of that. He’ll mention it to Giroux in a moment.

“Wow,” Giroux says. Brad opens his eyes. The sky hangs low and black overhead. As he stares, it splits in two.

Brad shoves upright, shot through with adrenaline. Thunder cracks the sky, or maybe his head instead. “Fuck.” Giroux’s hand on his arm, and they both stare into thick dark clouds glinting with yellow light. They roil.

“What’s happening?” Brad asks. Wind tears his words away. Giroux shakes his head. His mouth has fallen open.

Brad grips the edge of the platform, because the platform, huge as it is, is dipping and rising with the swells that are erupting in the middle of this goddamn overgrown lily pond. Something bumps beneath them – something more than a swell. A touch slithers around Brad’s wrist. “Oh fuck,” he whispers.

Somehow, he can’t quite see what’s touching him except that it’s black and it glistens. Another just like it wraps around his wrist. A third one rides up his leg into his boxers, and he didn’t think he’d have time to be scared, but he was wrong. Something finds his ass crack and twitches, a flick of movement against his cheeks. Brad shudders. Suddenly, the fear is past. He _wants_. “Come on.” He shoves a little against the tickle of the tentacle.

Then the curling tip of the thing is at his ass, and his whole body locks, anticipating. It pokes gently at first – like Brad did, when he’d tried a finger a few weeks ago. He didn’t want to go into this blind, but fuck, fuck he did, because the tip of presses in, and this is nothing the fuck like Brad’s finger. It worms around just inside. He’s got shivers from every single touch of it inside him, like sparks, like that first moment a hot pepper hits his tongue. This is good. He’s already getting hard again, he can do this, this is good.

Then it quits playing games and shoves straight into him. 

He screams. He empties his lungs the first time in shock, and then he gasps in another breath and keeps screaming, because he’s going to split apart, he’s going to shred into two halves, and he feels so goddamn much he can’t even tell if it hurts.

There’s water in his mouth. In his eyes, too, and he’s _in_ the water – how did that happen? His head goes under again, too quickly to react, and when he’s shoved up into the air again he’s choking, right up until something plunges into his mouth and down. For a beat he chokes on that, too, and then the gasping need in his lung eases. He’s still not getting any air. He closes his lips around the tentacle, and he tastes something – not bad, a little sour. A little numbing. Brad closes his eyes. 

The tentacle in his ass shoves deeper. His eyes pop open again, and he’s underwater now. It’s murky as hell, but lit with that same weird yellow glow he saw against the clouds. He can just barely see the tentacles around him, whipping and writhing like kelp in a rip tide. There’s another guy floating under the water a few meters away with blackness all his limbs wrapped in black. 

Brad inhales water and exhales it again, slow and deliberate. It feels like that time with the Cats when Yandle and his buddy broke out the weed. He inhales again, and it feels good, like the tentacle in his ass feels good: heavy and filling him.

He doesn’t know how deep the god is buried in his gut, but he can feel the moment it looses the egg in him. The surprise of it pushes the breath out of him, and he laughs around the tentacle in his mouth.

He floats. Another egg is coming – he can feel it stretching the tentacle stretching his hole. Brad squirms, trying to let it in. He _wants_ it. It comes loose in him like a bubble, but it doesn’t burst. It floats there in his belly. 

He wants to feel it. He pulls at the grip on his wrist. For just a moment, it loosens, and he wrenches away and presses his hand to belly. If he pushes in with his fingertips, he thinks he feel something round in there.

Then the bulk in his ass twists, and suddenly his belly is pressing back against his fingers. He yells, flailing backwards. A few bubbles of air still trapped in his lungs pop free of his mouth and float upward. Tentacles wrap his wrists again, like vines, and though he thrashes – out of instinct as much as anything – they don’t loosen. 

There are more eggs after that. A cramp grips Brad and he screams. Something bumps against his dick – not bog weed, but another tentacle. It winds around his dick, too gentle, more of a tickle than anything. A tease. The cramp sharpens in Brad’s gut, and then the touch on his dick becomes a grasp. His skin tingles, and it makes him startle in the water, and fuck, he _wants_ it. 

The tentacle rubs up the length of him, and he shudders. He didn’t think he had any shuddering left in him. It does it again, and he takes a breath of water up his nose. That same prickle works up him and down, and the touch as sharp on his dick as the pain is in his stomach, until he comes, a milky trail in the murk. Everything in him loosens, and the cramp in his belly is gone. He hangs his head with the relief of it.

Eggs continue to press into his gut. Brad loses track of them. He gasps water in and pants it out again, and he fills with eggs until he feels like he can’t take anymore. That alien, unnatural bloat in his belly is maxed out; he’ll burst if he takes any more. And yet they keep coming, each one feeling more impossible than the last. His chest heaves, but slowly, because all that water passing in and out of him takes more work than air ever did, and he’s tired now. He’s so fucking tired and his ass is so sore. He just wants to sleep.

Sometime later – hours? days? – the tentacles in his mouth and ass withdraw, and he’s shoved up into open air and over the edge of the platform. Brad rolls onto his belly, yelps, and rolls off it again. He lies on his back. He coughs up water and breathes air bubbling into his waterlogged lungs. He stares at the sky – brighter now than when he went under, if not by much. He closes his eyes.

*

Brad wakes up with water in his ears. His throat aches, and his ass is on fire, and his stomach—his stomach feels very strange. He pushes himself up far enough to shake his head, and a little bog water trickles out one ear. He steels himself and looks down.

His belly protrudes out over his dick, less like a pregnant woman’s and more like an enormous blister waiting to pop. All the room in his belly is taken up, the skin stretched taut over it. Skin is elastic, right? He won’t just rip open. Right?

H is very, very full. He pushes a little, testing, and just about falls back onto the deck when he feels something move. Cautiously, he pushes again, and this time he’s sure: he can feel the eggs roll under his fingers. They’re the size of ping-pong balls. In a couple of places he can even see the bumps they make in the surface of his belly.

“Sick,” he croaks. Fuck, his throat hurts.

Someone nearby groans. Distracted, Brad looks over. It’s Giroux, just a few meters away, and his stomach is obscenely distended. Or maybe it’s distended the same amount as Brad’s, but it looks different on another person. 

Giroux blinks his eyes open. “Fuck.” 

Brad doesn’t have the energy to respond. He just watches Giroux, and he sees the moment when Giroux’s eyes reach his stomach. They get bigger, and Giroux reaches down and begins the same exploration Brad did five minutes ago.

“Fuck,” Giroux repeats.

“Yeah.”

The platform slowly comes to life around them. Backstrom staggers to his feet. He’s still wearing a t-shirt, somehow, now damp and ripped down one arm hole. The hem sits on top of his belly. 

“How’s things?” Brad asks.

Backstrom blinks at him, one hand to a post. His other hand falls to his stomach, and he winces. He staggers towards them, unbalanced. Near Brad, he tries to sit and falls on his ass instead, and he cries sharply as he hits the boards.

Brad gives Backstrom some time to compose himself. If Brad fell on his ass with how it’s feeling right now, who knows what the hell kind of sounds he’d make. Eventually, he pokes Backstrom in the arm. “Okay?”

Backstrom nods shakily. He cradles his belly full of eggs with both hands.

Brad doesn’t ask Backstrom if he liked it. Backstrom might ask him back, and Brad isn’t sure, now, if he did.

After a while, Giroux says, “So are they back yet? The… adults?”

Brad looked around. All he saw were ten or so other would-be hockey players, holding their stomachs. “I don’t think so.”

“What about food?”

“I don’t want food,” Backstrom says.

Brad and Giroux look at each other. Brad shrugs. “Yeah, me, either.”

“Yeah,” Giroux agrees.

They all look at each other a while longer, and then Brad gets tired of holding himself upright. There are no walls to lean against in this place and only picnic benches in the cafeteria to sit on. Brad isn’t sure he’d even fit at one of those. So he just rolls back down onto his back, his stomach pointing to the sky.

A wind is picking back up. The platform rocks, very gently. Giroux lies down within arm’s reach. Backstrom looks out over the water – to the woods, Brad supposes. Nice woods around here. He saw them from the boat. He wonders if moose live at the edges of these waters, or if they stay away because of the gods.

“How long, do you think?” Backstrom says.

Giroux snorts. Brad shrugs a little further down the deck. The weight in his belly presses his hips into the wood. He traces over the curve and feels those bumps again. “I thought the adults would be here.”

“We’re adults,” Giroux says. “Unless you fuckers lied at the draft.”

Brad takes a deep breath. His chest still doesn’t feel right, though he doesn’t cough on every inhale anymore. Will he get pneumonia? He doesn’t remember hearing about that happening to other new picks, but maybe he wouldn’t. “Do you think it’s like this for everyone?”

“How?” Backstrom asks cautiously.

“All those guys we watched play – did they do this? Like – Crosby? Or Brodeur, or Jagr?”

“Not St. Louis,” Giroux says. It sounds very French, the way he says it.

“Not St. Louis,” Brad agrees. “But the rest of them. Did they get left like this, too?”

“We can ask them,” Giroux says. “When we get to the show, we can ask.”

Brad tries to imagine asking Zdeno Chara if he’d ever been incubator to a god. He fails. He pushes at his belly again, just to feel the eggs shift.

Night falls eventually. Brad sits up to watch a couple of the guys shuffle in towards the cots. That sounds like work and also uncomfortable. Giroux and Backstrom seem to agree. Brad falls asleep with Backstrom’s shoulder pressed against his and Giroux’s bushy red curls brushing Brad’s other arm.

*

The next day dawns overcast and muggy. Brad stands up, because he hasn’t yet and it seems like the thing to do. Besides, his hips are sore. He doesn’t expect how far off his balance is. He staggers to a tent pole and clings to it.

“Where are you going?” Backstrom asks.

“Mars,” Brad says. 

Backstrom flips him off, which heartens Brad somehow. He didn’t know Backstrom had it in him.

Slowly Brad makes his way around the perimeter, gripping a pole whenever one is handy. After a bit he gets the hang of walking with the weight out in front. He’s waddling, is what he’s doing. He’s fucking waddling.

Nobody laughs. Some of the guys are still asleep. Others are on their backs, gazing up at the sky. A couple are standing or stretching, as buck naked as Brad is, their guts just as full and heavy. Bernier’s got his feet hanging over the water like Brad did the day before, his belly of eggs resting in his lap. He looks up when Brad approaches and gives him a nod. It’s fine. Talking sounds like too much work to Brad, too.

By the time he gets halfway around the platform, he’s exhausted, his back aches, and there’s a feeling in his stomach like the beginning of a cramp. He cuts through the cook tent – Staal’s in there, and one of the other guys. Staal’s getting his dick touched and doesn’t even look up, and Brad leaves him to it.

When he gets back to Backstrom and Giroux, Backstrom is still horizontal and has both hands pressed to his belly, his face screwed up in pain. There’s a tear trickling down from the corner of his eye – it’ll drip right into his ear, pretty soon, and that’s the _worst_.

“It helps if you get off,” Brad says.

There’s a pause. Backstrom opens one quizzical eye.

“I’m serious. With the—” he gestures at his stomach. “It helps. When the—when I was getting plowed yesterday, I got a cramp, and then I got off and it was better.”

Backstrom takes one hand off his stomach and drops it down to his dick, but it’s a reach, getting around his stomach, and it’s a terrible angle . 

Brad sighs. He slumps down on the deck and puts his hand on Backstrom’s dick. “Okay?” Brad asks.

“Keep going,” Backstrom says, eyes shut tight again.

Brad gets him off. Just afterwards, that cramp that was threatening him stabs him through, and it’s Giroux’s hands on Brad’s dick, and Backstrom’s hands on his belly, massaging none too gently. Brad makes a noise that he means to be a question, and Backstrom says, “It helps me.” 

It helps Brad, too. Something about the pressure from Backstrom’s hands eases the tension. Also, Brad’s kind of into the jostle and shudder of the eggs against each other, and that means it doesn’t take long for Giroux to finish him.

“It’s weird, right?” Brad asks, words still a gasp. He’s holding his stomach with both hands. “It’s weird that it feels good.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s weird,” Giroux agrees. Brad peels open an eye to see if he’s getting judged, but Giroux’s staring at the slats of the platform with his hand draped over the top of his swell.

*

Brad wakes up feeling like he has to take a dump. That leads him to wondering where the bathrooms are around here. That pops his eyes open, because _oh shit_. He lies there for a while, focusing on that need, tickling at the corner of his consciousness. If he just clenches, can he keep them in?

Yeah, definitely not.

His stomach twinges. He rubs it to soothe the ache, and also to soothe himself. He can’t quite remember what it felt like before he was like this. He can’t remember a time before this one. He isn’t sure he wants to.

He lies there in the overcast substitute for dawn, and he takes the shallow breaths he’s capable of, and he waits.

Nearby, somebody makes a noise. It’s Backstrom; he sits up, looming into Brad’s view. “Soon,” he says.

Brad nods.

“Are you scared?” Backstrom doesn’t say it like a jibe. He just says it, peering into Brad’s eyes.

“Are you?” Brad counters.

Backstrom huffs and looks away. After a moment, he says, “We don’t have anything like this in Sweden.”

Brad pushes up onto his elbows. “You don’t?”

“Not anywhere in Europe, I don’t think. You didn’t know?”

Brad knew. He had just never given it much thought. Everyone knew if you wanted to get into the NHL, you had to do your time. Where would more hockey gods come from, if not by incubation in the very best hockey prospects? How would anyone be lucky? Who would protect from injury or keep the ice at its coldest, if not the hockey gods bred and born in the hockey bogs of Canada? 

At the end of all of this careful consideration, he says, “Huh.” He looks at Backstrom’s bowed head. “But wait. But you knew, right?”

“My parents wanted me to go the KHL. They don’t do this there.”

Carefully, Brad says, “Do you wish you did?”

Backstrom meets his eyes. There’s a glint in them Brad hasn’t seen before, in the two days he’s known this shy, blue-eyed kid with the flyaway white-blond hair. He bends over his belly and wraps both arms around it, daring Brad or anyone to touch. “No.”

“So are you scared?” Brad asks, because he suddenly thinks maybe he didn’t get the answer the first time.

Softly, Backstrom says, “I don’t want it to be over.”

Brad lies back down. The future of hockey weighs heavily on his spine. His back aches. “Yeah.”

Giroux wakes up after a while. He mutters and mumbles and blinks at them. He gets up onto his side and winces. “Soon, yeah?”

Brad hums agreement. His gut’s twinging again, and he’s rubbing it, but it’s not doing much good. Giroux puts his broad hand over Brad’s belly and begins to massage it. Brad sighs in relief. Then he sighs again, because Giroux’s hand drops just low enough to tickle, and fuck, Brad really wants a handie right now. “Do me?”

Giroux squints down at Brad, but then he shakes his head and takes Brad in hand. Brad closes his eyes, gasping each time Giroux strokes him in just the right spot. “Yeah,” Brad breathes. “Yeah, like that, you know it.”

“Fucking god, are you this annoying in bed?”

Brad glares at Giroux, ready to protest his awesomeness in bed – at least, the three or four times he’s ever gotten that far – but Giroux’s just grinning, like Brad flushed and running his mouth is the funniest fucking thing Giroux’s ever seen. Brad grins back – he can’t help it. “Good hands,” he says, and Giroux laughs .

He comes pretty soon after that, shuddering. Giroux grunts in annoyance and wipes his hand across Brad’s belly. The eggs shift under the pressure, and Brad is newly aware of an ever more pressing – definitely _pressing_ \- need. “Ugh.” He rubs at the underside of his stomach, but it doesn’t help. He should be loose after that orgasm, but instead everything feels abruptly too tight, like his body has suddenly remembered it isn’t supposed to be this size. He’s a little nauseous.

“Okay?” Giroux asks.

Brade can’t do this lying down. He pushes upright, onto his ass. The motion kicks the nausea up a notch, and this is still no way to push out eggs.

He gets his feet under him and rocks into a crouch, knees bent wide and frog-like to accommodate his belly, hands to the platform to keep himself balanced. It isn’t comfortable, but every other position he can think of is worse. He bows his head and closes his eyes, and he groans at that internal pressure that keeps building, like he might bust right open if he can’t get this shit out of him soon.

“Brad?”

Brad opens his eyes, and there’s Giroux, pale and scared. 

“I don’t feel good,” Brad says, and then he falls forward onto his knees as he retches. There’s nothing to throw up – his last meal seems like it was weeks ago. Strings of bile are all that come out of his mouth. His belly feels enormous, bloated far beyond its capacity and deeply unhappy. He rubs it – or shoves at it, because his coordination is for shit now – but it only brings a stabbing pain. 

It’s like the worst indigestion he’s ever had – that dare with the jalapeño peppers, fuck you, Hillsy - but times ten. He groans, and then he retches again. It does exactly as much good as it did before.

There’s a hand at his back. Backstrom’s. He’s patting at Brad’s shoulder blades. It doesn’t help.

“I gotta—” Brad says, trying to rock back up from his knees. Backstrom helps him. Brad grabs his arm and holds on, for balance and sanity. He groans from the pit of his stomach all the way up, and he bears down, and something cruelly large slips out of him and plops onto the deck.

“Fuck,” Giroux says. “Fucking—”

“What do we do with it?” Backstrom asks.

Brad doesn’t care. That feeling of deep, grotesque, sickly wrongness is building in his stomach again. He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to push, but it won’t go. It’s lodged up in him somewhere. “I can’t—” he gasps. Backstrom meets his eyes, and he looks as scared as Brad feels. 

“Wait for it,” Giroux says. “Like taking a shit. Sometimes you just have to wait.”

Brad doesn’t want to wait. He retches again in sheer misery, although Backstrom holds him up so he doesn’t fall over again. When he comes up for air, he finds his lashes sticking together, and his cheeks are wet. “Fuck,” he says weakly .

The pressure is building in him again like a wave, like the tide, starting at his spine and raying outwards to the bloated walls of his stomach and the root of his dick. His dick is kind of into this, he notices distantly, which is just too fucking weird to think about. He tries to breathe.

That unhealthy, alien jostling inside him suddenly resolves itself, and the egg begins working its way down. It’s still much too big for comfort, and he feels every glacial inch of its passage through him. When it finally works free and falls to the deck, it’s such a relief Brad nearly collapses on top of it. Only Backstrom’s grip keeps him on his feet.

“Thanks,” Brad says, trying to catch his breath. Backstrom gives him a thin smile. Something creases it – a twinge of pain. “You too?”

Backstrom swallows hard, and he nods. “Soon, I think.”

Things internal seem to settle for Brad. He can breathe a little. He can even stand up far enough to eye the things that’ve just come out of him. They do look a little like frog eggs: translucent and green, with a darker, featureless blob inside. They’re firmer than frog eggs, though. They’re also moist, and Brad hesitates for a moment before toeing first one, then the other over the edge of the platform. No good leaving them up here to dry.

Giroux heaves a groan, and Brad notices him for the first time in a while. He’s kneeling, hunched over his belly. Brad squeezes his shoulder and finds his skin already filmed with sweat. 

“Fuck,” Giroux says weakly.

“Yeah.”

Eventually Giroux heaves himself up into a squat and squeezes his eyes shut. Brad can track the egg’s progress by the strain in Giroux’s face. Finally, Giroux grunts sharply: out drops an egg. 

Brad rises to shove it over towards the water. The motion kicks something loose inside him. He presses a hand to his stomach, like that’s going to do anything except make him feel weirder. The eggs move more readily under his fingers now, maybe because they’ve got some room. The thought brings some of that nausea back.

“Backstrom?” Giroux rasps. Brad turns to find Backstrom holding onto Giroux, his whole body clenched. Brad takes a step toward him – for comfort or who knows the fuck what – and that niggling pressure in his gut moves decisively towards an exit. 

Brad drops into a squat. This time, without nausea or a cramp, all he can focus on is the sensation. He tries to breathe around it; he tries not to notice how big that egg is as it pushes through him. His breaths shorten, anticipating, waiting for that final, enormous release. For a moment, what feels like only inches inside him, it seems to stick, and he holds his breath altogether. He doesn’t push. He waits.

After a moment, gravity and destiny shifts the egg free. Still he doesn’t breathe until it passes out of him. He collapses on his knees with relief so strong it feels like euphoria. Distantly he hears the sounds of other people, of Backstrom and Giroux both in their own throes, but he can’t focus on them. He heaves in one breath at a time. On the third or fourth, he realizes that tickle against the underside of his belly is his dick. He closes his hand over himself and shudders, full-body. He palms the head, already wet. Another egg is descending, and he closes his eyes and his ears until all he knows is the egg passing through him and the delicious friction of his own hand on his dick. 

Wait, no. It must be two this time, one right after the other. They feel enormous, far bigger than when the god laid him in them. He works himself harder as they drop lower in him, and when they’re just five or ten seconds from passing, he comes. His whole body clenches around the alien, impossible objects stowed in his ass, and afterwards he can only clutch his knees and try to hold himself together and wait for the eggs to pass. He stumbles forward onto his knees and bows his head, breath still gasping.

When he can open his eyes again, he finds Giroux in the last stages of passing an egg and Backstrom on his knees, crying. Brad can feel the next egg already, but he wobbles over to Backstrom anyway. “Hey, man. You okay?”

Backstrom looks up through wet lashes. “Yeah, it’s okay. I’m just—it’s so much.”

“Yeah,” Brad says. “Yeah.” 

*

Time stretches into meaninglessness. Brad has no idea how many eggs he passes – surely more than the god laid in him, but then he doesn’t really remember how many that was, either. He gets himself off again. When he’s aware enough to notice what’s around him, he checks in on Giroux and Backstrom; generally they’re too out of it to notice. 

The deck is littered with eggs, because no one is kicking them into the water anymore, and eventually, inevitably, Brad steps on one. It goes _squish_ under his foot. He scrapes the goo off, and he stares at the stain that remains. Is a goal he won’t score now? Is it a bad hit on the boards that takes out his shoulder? No one fucking knows how these things work. 

Brad spends a couple of minutes shoving the other eggs off the deck, until he has to squat again.

In another spare moment, he presses his hand to his lower belly. Surely he’s empty now. Yet now that he presses, he feels another egg starting to drop. “Fucking really?” he asks. He squats. His legs are so tired. Everything is so tired.

After that one, he kneels on the deck, hunched over, waiting. And waiting.

*

Brad wakes curled up on his side. The platform is hard under his shoulder and his hip. His head aches. His ass—

His ass is tender. Hs belly is empty and stretched and sore. He rolls onto his back and experimentally palms his dick, but even his dick’s had enough. He’s finished. He’s _finished_. 

Never in his life has Brad felt so satisfied.

From nearby comes a groan that he recognizes now as Giroux’s. “Are they back yet? I’m fucking starving.”

*

The NHL guys haven’t come back yet. No one dares question whether they will. 

They’ve all lost weight. Two days without food – three? four? Fuck if Brad knows – shouldn’t be able to whittle a person down so thin, but without their deceptively full bellies, they all look like they’re on their way to starvation. The puppy fat around Giroux’s face has melted away, and Backstrom’s cheekbones look higher and sharper than when they got here. 

Nudity is making Brad’s skin prickle now. Only some of the prickle is cold. He goes looking in the tents, and he finds the shorts he was wearing when they arrived on the floor next to the cot he slept in that first night. They’re as dirty now as they were then, but he doesn’t have anything else. No one gave him time to pack a bag. His t-shirt is nowhere to be found.

Giroux and Backstrom are where he left them. Giroux won’t meet his eye. Brad sits down next to Backstrom and nudges his shoulder. “So was that fucking nuts or what?”

Backstrom eyes him carefully. “I didn’t see any nuts.”

Brad’s mouth is already open when he realizes Backstrom was kidding. _Kidding_. “Asshole,” Brad says. A mosquito whines near his head. He bats at it. They never bothered him before. He woke up today without a single bite.

Backstrom smooths his hand over his belly. “It wasn’t like I thought.”

Brad considers that. “It was—it was _more_ than I thought.” He shrugs helplessly. He doesn’t know how to describe what he feels.

“And now it’s over, and we go play hockey, right? Like we planned. Everything is normal again.”

“Yeah,” Brad says, dispirited. “Or you will, anyway.” Backstrom gives him a look. “Third rounder here, man. You’ve got an NHL spot on lock – or a few games at least. Who knows if I ever even make it out of Providence.”

“How many other third rounders do you see?” Backstrom asks.

Brad blinks. He looks around, but he’s been too busy getting ass-fucked to get everyone’s name. “I dunno?”

“Most of them don’t get this far.”

Brad is full of questions - _How do you know? How do you know and I don’t? How do **they** know?_ He swallows them all. “Huh.” He’s going to think about that a lot more, later. “So I’ll see you around, then.”

Backstrom smiles. It’s the first one Brad has ever seen on him. It’s like a light turns on in him, and he glows with it. “Yeah.”

Fuck, Brad’s hungry. His stomach feels like a cavern due for a collapse.

“Hey,” Giroux says, his first words in hours. He shoves to his feet. “Hey, I think I hear them.”

Straining, Brad can hear it, too: the whine of a boat motor. It doesn’t sound all that different from a mosquito, honestly. “Thank fucking god.” 

He starts to stand, and Backstrom pulls him down again. “We can come back,” he whispers. Brad stares at him. The words don’t compute. “It’s not just draft picks that come here.”

“It’s not?” Brad asks. His brain feels stupidly slow.

“Cup winners, too. Every year.” Backstrom grins like something feral, not quite human, and then he pushes to his feet.

Brad sits there a moment longer, letting the knowledge sink in like certainty, like a promise. As he gets his feet under him, he knows in his gut that it’s true: he’s going to win a fucking Cup.

END 


End file.
